Long Term Evolution (LTE) is an improved universal mobile telecommunication system (UMTS) that provides higher data rate, lower latency and improved system capacity. In LTE systems, an evolved universal terrestrial radio access network includes a plurality of base stations, referred as evolved Node-Bs (eNBs), communicating with a plurality of mobile stations, referred as user equipment (UE). A UE may communicate with a base station or an eNB via the downlink and uplink. The downlink (DL) refers to the communication from the base station to the UE. The uplink (UL) refers to the communication from the UE to the base station. LTE is commonly marketed as 4G LTE, and the LTE standard is developed by 3GPP.
In a wireless cellular communications system, multiuser multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) is a promising technique to significantly increase the cell capacity. In MU-MIMO, the signals intended to different users are simultaneously transmitted with orthogonal (or quasi-orthogonal) precoders. On top of that, the concept of a joint optimization of MU operation from both transmitter and receiver's perspective has the potential to further improve MU system capacity even if the transmission and precoding is non-orthogonal. For example, the simultaneous transmission of a large number of non-orthogonal beams/layers with the possibility of more than one layer of data transmission in a beam. Such non-orthogonal transmission could allow multiple users to share the same resource elements without spatial separation, and allow improving the multiuser system capacity for networks with a small number of transmit antennas (i.e. 2 or 4, or even 1), where MU-MIMO based on spatial multiplexing is typically limited by wide beamwidth.
Multi-user superposition transmission (MUST) is a new technique of such joint optimization associated with power allocation and interference cancellation to enable high system capacity in LTE networks. It is under investigation in LTE Release-13. It may include two commonly discussed multi-user transmission approaches, MU-MIMO, and non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA). The MU-MIMO approach transmits signals intended to different users with orthogonal (or quasi-orthogonal) precoders. In contrast, the NOMA approach tends to precode transmitted signals for co-channel users by same spatial direction with un-equal power allocation.
MUST technique allows simultaneous transmission for multiple users on the same time-frequency resources. A serving base station pairs two or more users together, and applies transmit beamforming (precoding) derived from channel information feedback to achieve transmission of multiple transport-blocks to multiple users. As a result, the mutual interference between the co-channel transmissions to multiple mobile stations could degrade performance seriously. Fortunately, with a proper design on the power allocation, the code-rate, and modulation order of the co-channel signals, and assisted information for the signal format of un-wanted interference, it is possible to let a UE cancel the unwanted co-channel interference intended for other UEs.
Consider two particular users in a cell of a cellular communications system. One of the users has a good channel quality probably because it is geometrically close to the base station (BS). This user is called the near-user equipment (UE). The other user has a relatively worse signal quality than the near-UE probably due to the larger distance from the BS. This user is called the far-UE. When multiuser superposition transmission (MUST) is used, the signals intended to the near-UE and the far-UE are superposed. According to theoretical analysis, such superposition transmission provides a larger weighted sum rate than the orthogonal transmission scheme such as the time division multiple access (TDMA) when users scheduling fairness is taken into account.
The simplest way to implement the modulation of the MUST scheme is passing the bits for the near-UE and far-UE individually to their modulators and summing up the modulated symbols. This scheme is called Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA). However, the constellation points resulting from such modulation scheme may not follow the Gray coding rule, i.e., the bit sequences corresponding to two adjacent constellation points differ in only one bit. A modified modulation scheme is called Semi-Orthogonal Multiple Access (SOMA). Under SOMA, the coded bits of the far-UE is passed directly to the far-UE's modulator, while the coded bits of the near-UE goes through a Gray converter before entering its modulator. The Gray converter enables the constellation points of the superposed signal to fit the rule of Gray coding, i.e., the bit sequences of two adjacent constellation points differ in only one bit. When the power split factor 0<α<1 (the ratio of power allocated to the near-UE) is small, the constellation points corresponding to the same far-UE bit sequence are close to each other and form a cluster.
However, such clustering of constellation points is not always the case when the power split factor α becomes large. It can be observed the decision regions of different far-user bit sequences overlap with each other, and the performance of demodulation is expected to degrade. A new modulation scheme is sought for superposed signals of MUST scheme.